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Finally

Well, I finally have the garage door that I have been waiting for ever since I moved in my house 5 years ago. Not only did I get a garage door, but I also put in a real door to the back of my garage. It has been a chainlink gate which was worthless. ( I will be selling this on ebay, claiming it has the image of "Mary" if anyone is interested) I wonder if this will be like when I end up buying rims for my cars. Every time I buy rims, I end up selling the car a few months later. I dont know why but it always happens. So now that I have this door, I wonder if that means I am going to sell my house soon? Well here are the highly anticipated pictures...

Puppies

While going through pictures to find my fish stuff, I decided to post pictures of the dogs I have owned, from oldest to newest.

Angus (no picture)

Devil Dog




Turtle




Jersey




Precious
(the one I bought)




(the one I recieved)

Here Fishy, Fishy. Fishy

I don’t know how I developed such a great fondness for fish. My parents have always had fish, be it freshwater fish, but I fondly remember the sound of the old bubbler that would create a slight metallic hum as it forced air into the tank. I also remember how we had the big trip to the “city.” If we were lucky, after talking Mom into buying me some $.10 popcorn from King’s we made our way to Teacher’s Pets to look and sometimes buy a fish or two and for my Mom to look at the little quarter-sized turtles that she always told us about. When at the store my Mom always bought the little guppies, which never really held the mastic as a piranha or something, but I still enjoyed the fish. I remember sitting on the couch or chair and watching the fish in the little 10 gallon tank. I could do it for hours and hours. My parents always seemed to have different animals throughout my life. One of these animals was a Red-eared slider water turtle. I think my sister bought it and it ended up at my parent’s house. It had been there for years and had obviously outgrown the small 10 gallon tank that it lived in. So I decided to take the turtle home and give it better living quarters. I bought a nice turtle tank and I also bought some feeder goldfish. I had that turtle for quite a while and from the day I had it, there were 2 goldfish that the turtle wouldn’t eat.

When I finally decided to let the turtle back into the wild, I still had these 2 goldfish. The turtle tank was a tank that you could only fill halfway and it didn’t give the fish much room to swim, so I ran out and bought myself a 30 gallon for these fish. I bought a few other fish to go along with the gold fish and setup the new tank. ( I think a few of these fish may even be a live today :p)



When I went to buy the tank, I was looking at all the fancy saltwater fish, wishing I could do a saltwater tank. At the time, I thought the cost and the maintenance would be too much so I settled on the freshwater tank. I had this tank with the fish for about a year before I met retch2k. She had absolutely no interest in my fish at all and actually told me how much she hated fish. I was still contemplating switching over to saltwater, but the cost seemed way too high. Retch2k and I did some research and came to the conclusion that it would only cost $300-400 to switch over. This seemed relatively cheap from what I thought it would cost so I had planned on starting buy the equipment needed to switch to saltwater. Well, Retch2k and I went on vacation in Mexico (picture may be removed on request)


and while we were there we did some beach combing and found some crabs, some corals, and shells. We caught the critters and decided that we would put them in the saltwater tank which we had yet to switch over to. So when we made it back from Mexico, the race was on. We ran out and found all the stuff needed to switch the tank over before the critters we brought home died. As we were doing this switch over, it was quickly realized that the cost to switch over was WAY more then what we had thought. The things we needed to buy included a skimmer, a refugium, powerheads, the salt mix, live rock, live sand, a light fixture, and of course the pricy fish.

Once I had the tank up and running, I believe this is where my obsession began. After having that tank for about a year, I decided I needed a bigger one. I found a120 gallon tank and decided to buy it, I won’t even comment on how much I have spent on this tank and equipment. (don’t know if I would choose one as big as I did if I did it again)







Maintaining this tank can be somewhat of a pain at times. The time and effort needed to keep it clean and keep everything alive is proportionate to the size. The little 30 gallon tank was really easy and I didn’t have to spend as much time and money to keep things alive. With the big tank, I can’t count how many expensive fish have been purchased only to find them dead a few days later.
Anyway, since scrat2k aka retch2k aka the thief posted a few pictures of her saltwater tank (my old 30g) I decided to write this blog and post a few of mine.